Tag: Computing
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Computer Security: Hot Review Summer, Cool Deployment Autumn
This summer has seen a plethora of different assessments of the Organization’s security posture and stance. While an external vulnerability scan of CERN’s Internet presence and a red-teaming penetration test are still ongoing, the Computer Security Office, in collaboration with the IT Department, is continuing to mitigate the findings of the 2023 cybersecurity audit, the
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Computer Security: AI – Game over, mankind?
With the more and more prevalent use of agentic AI, i.e. programmed agents acting and working on our behalf, and in a fully interconnected world, i.e. us living in symbiosis with the Internet, smartphones and control systems, how far-fetched is it that humans can actually become a threat to an AI system such that it
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Training the world’s future quantum experts
From 10 to 12 July 2026, CERN hosted the second edition of the Quantum Materials Hackathon at CERN’s IdeaSquare, which brought together 34 students of over 30 nationalities. The students used quantum computing hardware and simulators to tackle real-world problems, guided by mentors from industry and the research community. Quantum materials are particularly important at CERN, as many of the
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Computer Security: One click to many
More senior colleagues might still recall the regular “clicking” campaigns that were intended to raise security awareness within the Organization among staff and users. With the roll-out of two-factor authentication, such campaigns were dropped. However, the world continues to turn and novel functionality and novel attack vectors try to circumvent our protections. And they have
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Computer Security: Copied, committed, KO
The old world of reusable IT components has been under threat for a while. While it was appreciated, efficient and effective to reuse software components written by others, attacks abusing this kind of “supply chain” are on the rise. For instance, rest-client in 2019, plutov-slack-client in 2020, atomicwrites in 2022, xzutils in 2024, chalk, “Shai-Hulud”
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CERN leads project to make EU scientific data more accessible
Sharing research data openly is transforming science, but it comes with challenges. Since 2021, EU-funded projects have been required to make their data FAIR: findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. The EU Open Research Repository (EOR Repository) was created through the HORIZON-ZEN project with this in mind and provides a dedicated space on Zenodo for data